Puzzling Discovery

While putting together a 3D Empire State Building puzzle with 3 of my friends I learned some lessons of team bonding, using your strengths, recognizing your weaknesses and supporting your team mates. We pulled out all the pieces, put the hockey game on and set ourselves a goal to finish in 4 hours; we thought this was going to be a leisurely addition to our evening, it quickly turned in an educating experience. As we began sorting the pieces, it was evident that we each had very different strengths.

Ed and Troy were only interested in participating when the hockey game was boring or during a commercial, their attention level was waning. Wandee and I were much more dedicated to the process. Wandee has her puzzle strategy well honed, I followed suit as she started to sort the pieces by colour. After we sorted all the pieces into colour we started assembling the pieces. I found that I am a better support puzzle participant. I was very good at sorting pieces with fine detail, finding specific pieces to finish a section and supporting the Wandee as she speedily put section after section together, but alas I was not keen on how slow my sections were coming together, I felt ineffective on my own but much better as part of the puzzle team.

Eventually, we put the whole thing together and it was very satisfying, unfortunately we were far over schedule we actually had to take a break, go to sleep and finish the next morning. So even though it took 2 times longer than anticipated it was surprisingly fun! Wandee was truly the puzzle hero of the weekend, she was so focused, deliberate and would have stayed up all night to finish it if we had let her.